Cordesman's Speech to NDU

As other commentators have noted, Anthony Cordesman of CSIS gave a speech to the National Defense University on 10 March which contained some blistering assessments of the DoD's approach to strategy and budget. As I work on the next installment of my strategy posts, I found the following passage extremely resonant:

This brings me to the last of my three principles: Any meaningful strategy must be
based on detailed force plans, procurement plans, program budgets, and measure of
effectiveness.

If God really hates you, you may end up working on a Quadrennial Defense Review:
The most pointless and destructive planning effort imaginable. You will waste two years on a document decoupled from a real world force plan, from an honest set of decisions about manpower or procurement, with no clear budget or FYDP, and with no metrics to measure or determine its success.

If God merely dislikes you, you may end up helping your service chief or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs draft one of those vague, anodyne strategy documents that is all concepts and no plans or execution.

If God is totally indifferent, you will end up working on our national strategy and simply be irrelevant.

Ouch.  And yet I have difficulty arguing against any of it with clear and relevant evidence.  All the evidence supports his position.

I think most regular readers of this blog would agree that one potential cause for this trend is that topics such as strategy and budget have increasingly become isolated from open and general discussion, and become topics mostly argued in an echo chamber - or series of them.  Budget discussions inside the services are isolated from each other; budget discussions at the DoD level are (as we've seen recently with non-disclosure policies) isolated from the public and from the non-DoD professional analysts.  Strategy is something handed out in very colorful documents once complete enough to be used for budget request support, but during the formation of these strategies the actual discourse on their construction is something that is increasingly difficult to get hold of much less be a part of.

Cordesman goes on to state that much if not all of the services' strategy and budget expertise and time does not go towards developing budgets and strategies that benefit the United States vis-a-vis the world.  Rather, it goes to developing them to benefit the services vis-a-vis each other or the DoD vis-a-vis the rest of the Federal budget. 

There is a school of thought which says that this competition is good for managing defense expenditure, and in the abstract that makes sense.  If each service is pitted against the others in competition for roles and budgets, you can always tap each service's analysis of its sibling services' proposals to garner an opposing position.  The problem comes (and I think we're at this point) when there is not enough expertise outside the service and DoD trees to 'manage' that competitive analysis.  As a result, the services' analytic output is being co-opted by the DoD structure in order to justify the DoD budget as a whole.  The DoD structure, which should be coming up with a unified strategy, garnering a total budget and then forcing the services to compete for pieces of that budget in support of the strategy is instead directing all of its firepower upwards to Congress and the American public to justify the total budget size.  

This is a particularly severe problem if the non-DoD establishment of analysts, commentators and decisionmakers does not have reliable access to strategy and budget deliberations and data.  That isolation is what allows DoD and the services to collude to 'export' all of their uncertainties and risks upward, forcing the nation as a whole to assume all that risk which normally would be used to right-size service budgets.